Christian Ideals in British Culture

Stories of Belief in the Twentieth Century

D. Nash

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137349057
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book offers a challenge to conventional histories of secularisation by focusing upon the importance of central religious narratives. These narratives are changed significantly over time, but also to have been invested with importance and meaning by religious individuals and organisations as well as by secular ones.

1

Restoring the Balance – Religious Stories and the Secular World¹

The House of Lords Select Committee, which met in 2003 to consider the issue of incitement to religious hatred, heard a great variety of evidence from a bewildering array of religious and other interest groups. Its final recommendations could scarcely avoid recognising this variety, alongside other imperatives that spoke of peace, order and the urge to empower and protect communities. The United Kingdom, in the new millennium, by now hosted many different religious traditions from its colonial past and from its status as a nation with open borders within a religious and ethnically diverse European community.

The urge to endorse a still developing multicultural agenda hung over the committee’s deliberations and its membership was a showcase for the different traditions and new ways in which the ‘faith communities’ of Britain were represented. Yet the committee was starkly surprised at how it was confronted by vocal, organised Christianity represented by individuals, congregations, groups, denominations and traditions. All served to make the voice of modern Christianity heard on this seminally important matter. From these profound, yet different, pressures the Select Committee’s conclusions contained the bald and unequivocal statement that Britain was still ‘a Christian Country’.² This book is a sustained attempt to unravel the meaning and importance of this statement in the wider academic context of debates within religious history. An arm of government was prepared to declare that Christianity was a central plank of British culture at the same time that statistics, impressions, argument and academic analysis appeared to prove that the country had witnessed religion growing progressively less important by the year. As such this book is an attempt to analyse what this mismatch of observations actually means.³ To do this it analyses religious history and traces its use, misuse and relevance (predominantly in the twentieth century) to prise open the debate about just how religious the English actually were, have been and might yet remain.

This last statement is especially important because this book does not seek to be dragged into one or other corner of the long raging secularisation debate. It acknowledges that organised Christianity has, according to a number of measures, lost ground during the twentieth century in Britain. However, it remains sceptical of some of the claims of secularisation theory and inferences drawn from observing the process of secularisation. Such scepticism questions the irrevocable nature of supposed changes and precisely what this means for the future (and the past) of Christian religion in Britain. It is equally not an extended and simple denial of the idea of secularisation, although in the course of this book the concept scarcely escapes criticism.⁴ As I hope will become clear such a simple denial invites further discussion around an enduringly frustrating argument which masks more than it illuminates about religious history or the history of religion in Britain.⁵ This is perhaps because sociological, theory driven, secularisation-style history and more conventional religious history have, up to now, largely been operating with separate agendas.

To create much more of an integrated history this volume hopes to instigate a discursive movement away from simple questions of when Britain was religious, and a focus upon the corollary of this statement that it has ceased to be so. Instead it wants to inspire a new scholarship, which looks at precisely how societies have been religious in the past and how both religious professionals and individuals in their own lives have striven to make this a reality. This particular story has, without doubt, been eclipsed by the dominance of the secularisation thesis and the attempts to establish secularisation as an observable process.

As such this book walks into something of an historiographical minefield. The history of religion has been recently rejuvenated to some effect through the realisation that many previous forms of analysis around religion equated this myopically with Christianity – and specifically organised Christianity.⁶ This led to many of the narratives of religion describing one-dimensional decline and to sometimes emphasise a ‘post-Christian Britain’ or a ‘secular world’. Such decline narratives offered various versions of the ‘secularisation’ thesis, generally with an attendant concentration upon Christianity facing species of irreversible decline. Likewise there has also been a description of a theoretical realignment of Christianity’s place in modernity through descriptions of a ‘secular age’ to which it has responded in various ways.⁷

Decline-infused history has often described increasingly remote religious institutions alongside a fading and arguably understudied private piety.⁸ Versions of this decline paradigm root Christianity firmly in the historic past, yet also this has a profound and largely unexplored influence on the contemporary perception of religion. This state of affairs was initially propelled by the secularisation thesis but has been exacerbated by both an oft-repeated description of decline and the failure to study religion alongside many aspects of modern history. An especial feature of this history has been an overwhelming pessimism, often driven by the agendas of empirical historians.⁹

Similarly an over-enthusiasm for secularisation theory-based approaches inadequately explains many aspects of Christianity’s enduring importance beyond institutions both in this historic past and the contemporary world.¹⁰ Therefore this book addresses this by investigating the surprising longevity of Christian ideals and portrayals, sometimes beyond traditionally studied religious forms. However, it also portrays the attempts of some of the most apparently intransigent and anachronistic religious institutions to make themselves relevant and address the problems confronting Christianity in the twentieth century. It is also evident that in some areas these institutions were capable of limited or even surprising levels of success. Studying these attempts provides new tools of analysis to shape the history of religion’s place in people’s lives. Thus this is a work which begins to chart a history of religion in Britain apart from, and beyond, the influence of histories of religious decline. It also aims to provide some answers to the problems that have beset the more conventional secularisation-shaped views of Christianity and its history. In particular it develops an agenda advocating a religious history which investigates religious ideals as beliefs and practices individuals used to mould and explain their lives. This moves the study away from conventional measures of religiosity and looks at the meaning and consequence of religion within wider social and cultural history. By default this also makes it a sustained critique of models that portray religion and beliefs associated with it as firstly somehow culturally inescapable and secondly ‘hard wired’ into the human consciousness.¹¹

The history of modern Christianity in Britain will hopefully use these conclusions to look at a perspective beyond doctrines, denominations and demographics. Instead they point to the widespread and re-occurring relevance of central Christian stories around which individuals have organised their lives. However, during the twentieth century these did cease to be the exclusive and regulated property of Christianity itself, although Christianity could still exert influence over them. Once available, through widespread idioms, they became capable of reiteration, reinterpretation and reuse in a number of guises. Charting these illuminates not only a wider history of belief, but also the cultural history of other episodes in other branches of the discipline of history. Thus this approach focuses upon believers and audiences more than the doctrines, denominational histories and demographic approaches, which have focussed on how conventional religion was ‘supplied’ to individuals and taken up by them.¹² This has hitherto been the failing of the separated ecclesiastical history and social science inspired histories of religion over the longue durée.

I Secularisation theory and its unresolved issues

At this point we should note that modernism’s assumption of its own triumph saw late nineteenth-century rejection of religion as an immediate rejection of all Christianity and religious forms for all time. This scarcely considered the possibility that dissatisfaction with Christianity was a dissatisfaction with existing forms or was episodic, merely generational, or the symptom of changing needs among the religious. It is salutary in this instance to note that sociologists of religion interested in fringe and cult religious groupings routinely start from the assumption that they are instigated by the failure of more conventional religious forms. Indeed one of the traditional modernisation narratives can sometimes be turned on its head. Two writers in 1988 noted how ‘The pervasive secularisation of society in the nineteenth century, assisted by rapid industrialisation and the even swifter pace of innovation, provided for the effective weakening of traditional values and social bonding.’ This was not the prelude to the conventional secularisation narrative, but instead a premise for viewing weakened social bonds as an instigator of strong motives for ‘conversion’ specifically as an active antidote to such pressures.¹³

Secularisation theory and the history of the secularisation process also encourages an overt obsession with pessimistic chronology. This is forever in pursuit of the critical moment that can be identified as the start of irretrievable decline, which is accompanied by a periodisation of such decline. Thus a function of this book is to demonstrate that ideas such as the assertion of a sudden ‘age of indifference’ and a secularisation ‘moment’ or ‘decade’ is overstated and given too great an emphasis. Christian ideals prevalent in society still exerted considerable influence both upon the faithful and the indifferent over the wider twentieth century. This suggestion engages critically with the previous suggestions that there was an ‘age of faith’ and an ‘age of indifference’, since these polarities scarcely offer a viable explanation of religious history’s realities in Britain.¹⁴

Secularisation (as theory or process) has an inbuilt obsession with decline, which begs other questions. Why, for example, should churchgoing’s gradual replacement by private unstructured (and less visible) spiritual devotion be automatically labelled a diminution, dilution and definitively more secular way to behave?¹⁵ The last of these, it should be acknowledged, potentially spawns deeper religiosity among some individuals, alongside a much more often discussed and recorded indifference. This catalogued indifference is obvious to those who rely upon statistical evidence, which has been central to the construction of the classic model of secularisation as theory and observation.¹⁶ But the conclusions from these sources nonetheless need to be tempered with a greater range of questions and analysis about the nature of religiosity.¹⁷ This is especially pertinent since the twentieth-century, social science inspired, history rashly assumed that private belief was a profoundly modern invention. The historical past produces evidence of such phenomena existing side by side with conventional modes of adherence – readily indicating that such polarisation is something of a modern assumption.¹⁸ Moreover it is now less obvious why such changes should be signposted as somehow permanent and a dismal milestone on a unilinear downward spiral from belief to secularity.¹⁹ This is before we consider, for instance, the startled disappointment of past commentators such as Erasmus, who observed those following specific occupations, or having particular preoccupations, praying to specific saints. What contemporaries dismissed as instrumentality looks to us like the considered and rational ‘use’ of religion’.²⁰

Simon Green’s recent re-creation of the secularisation thesis argues that only ‘a few eccentrics’, fail to acknowledge the ‘underlying dynamic’ of religion fading from the West. But Green also, however, notes that the throwing of the religious baby out with the secularisation bathwater creates, by default, the marginalisation of religion. Significantly Green seeks to locate religion back as a driver of social and cultural change to produce what he terms ‘a social history of religion in Britain’. Such a reorientation is necessary because Green also notes an ‘intellectual fragmentation and descriptive deficiency’, which has potentially led to the divorce of ‘the social history of religion from ecclesiastical and even intellectual historiography’.²¹ The barriers to the integration of religion and social history are primarily constructed by a rarefied view of religion concerning ‘highbrow debates concerning the proper content of justifiable fate’ and the separate division of “‘popular” religious culture’. In many respects it is worth considering how far the judgments inherent in secularisation theory narratives inherit this bias.²² Within this paradigm such scrutiny involves unpicking changing practice to represent it either as a dilution of a previously higher form of the religious/sacred, or equally as a re-affirmation of an idealised past.

What Green calls the anti-secularisation thesis is still substantially criticised for the apparently overwhelming evidence in the opposing direction. Likewise ‘It presumes too much because its blanket repudiation even of the possibility of a historical process of secularisation effectively denies most of the putative content of religious history tout court.’²³ Criticisms of this anti-secularisation thesis suggest its advocates assume a constant ‘religious economy’ in which institutions and affinities are actively replaced by new forms to preserve this economy’s apparent ‘size’. This, as critics of anti-secularisation point out, would make it different to any other economy we are likely to analyse.²⁴ However, it remains interesting that anti-secularisation, as a theory, finds it essential in some measure to posit a numerically equal replacement of lost religiosity. Pursuing a numerical counter argument again demonstrates the sheer pervasiveness of the secularisation thesis and its analytical approaches. The urge to count trumps the need to research the changing nature of religiosity, which should, at the very least, remove the confidence from secularisation theory’s assertion that it tells the whole unequivocal story. Thus it is not anti-secularisation theory that ignores the ‘putative content of religious history’ but actually secularisation theory itself.

Secularisation theory’s ambition and its impact upon religious history is perhaps exemplified in Simon Green’s restatement of the central thrust of its explanation.

Secularisation, according to this understanding, meant the systematic and inexorable decline ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Restoring the Balance – Religious Stories and the Secular World
• 2 Pilgrims, Seekers, Samaritans and Saviours
• 3 Saved and Transfigured Selves – Salvation, Old and New
• 4 ‘Marching as to War’ – Soldiers and Warriors: ‘Just’ and ‘Unjust’ Wars
• 5 ‘At the Going Down of the Sun’ – Collective Loss and Collective Remembrance
• 6 ‘Our Way to Eternal Joy is to Suffer Here with Christ’ – Sickness, Pain and Dying
• 7 Moments and Reactions – Religious and Secular Episodes
• 8 ‘And men were saved in a way they are not now’ – Anglican Decline Stories and the Myth of the Religious Golden Age
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index